id Software 'Pushing Boundaries,' Focusing Only on Doom 4

Doom 4’s troubled development is no secret, but Bethesda and id Software have, until now, been silent about what went wrong behind the scenes. At Quake-Con 2013, IGN spoke with id Software’s studio director, Tim Willits, and Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines to find out what led to Doom’s delay, changes, and future. So what went wrong?

“It wasn’t one thing,” Willits tells IGN. “It wasn’t like the art was bad, or the programming was bad. Every game has a soul. Every game has a spirit. When you played Rage, you got the spirit. And [Doom] did not have the spirit, it did not have the soul, it didn’t have a personality. It had a bit of schizophrenia, a little bit of an identity crisis. It didn’t have the passion and soul of what an id game is. Everyone knows the feeling of Doom, but it’s very hard to articulate.”

Neither Bethesda nor id could recognize Doom in the game they were making, so they agreed to start over on the next Doom -- a game which Willits emphasizes was never formally announced, but revealed in job listings.

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I don’t want anybody to look at id’s next project and have this reaction that it’s still stuck in the 90s.

“If it was like the quintessential, ‘yup, that’s Doom 4,’ then we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” says Hines. “But, it was something that we looked at and the id guys looked at and said, look, it’s not even that something is necessarily bad. But is it good enough? You can make a game and say, ‘that’s not a bad game, but it’s not as good as an Elder Scrolls game should be,’ and there’s a difference...it’s not great. It’s not amazing. It’s not what people have waited all this time for. It needs to be like ‘this was totally worth the wait.’ And I think what the guys at id are working on is...they’re pushing the boundaries and challenging themselves. I don’t want anybody to look at id’s next project and have this reaction that it’s still stuck in the 90s.”

Willits smiles and dances around any questions regarding the future of “the new project” -- he never says Doom. “We focused everybody. All hands on deck.” It is the only major project at id Software today. Willits says the team’s “cut distractions out,” and focusing hard on the next thing. “If you have everyone marching to the same drummer, you can get places.”

Presently, both id and Bethesda assure that the new game is well on its way to realizing a more cohesive, careful vision.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.